Europe midday: German Dax continues to grind higher, technology issues lead

Stocks across the Continent are bounding higher, tracking fresh gains overnight on Wall Street and helped by a dip in the single currency's value.

Germany's benchmark Dax index was continuing to grind nearer its year-to-date and record highs, whereas its peers in Europe remained range-bound far below.

"The apparent disconnect between markets and the real world gets wider and wider, fuelled by low interest rates, the prospect of more easing, but also the hope that the overall situation will continue to improve," said IG chief market analyst Chris Beauchamp.

"On that point, there still seems no sign of a real downward turn in data. True, many datapoints have flattened out after the March-June rebound, but flattening out is not the same as falling."

As of 1100 BST, the benchmark Stoxx 600 was climbing 2.11% to 372.95 alongside a similar rise of 2.38% for the German Dax to 13,283.31, although Spain's Ibex 35 was lagging behind, adding only 1.18% to 7,039.10.

Euro/dollar was down 0.52% to 1.1850 alongside.

Technology issues were again in the lead, with the Stoxx 600 sector gauge advancing 2.67%, while lenders' shares were up by only 0.6%.

Retail sales volumes in Germany undershot economists' forecasts for July, falling at a month-on-month pace of 0.9% (consensus: 0.5%), although versus their year earlier level they were up by 4.2% (consensus: 4.1%).

In Spain meanwhile, the number of registered unemployed rose by 30,000 in August, climbing back above the 3.8m mark.

On the pandemic front, Spain's second wave of the novel coronavirus had now surpassed the first in terms of the daily count of new cases, although fatalities remained far beneath their levels of the spring, with a similar pattern evident in the Czech Republic, said analysts at Pantheon Macroeconomics.

In Germany the daily case count was still heading lower and in Italy and Switzerland they appeared to be flattening.